


Herrenvolk

by Hth



Category: Smallville
Genre: Multi, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-14
Updated: 2009-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-04 10:25:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why didn't she resist this, escape this, unfurl falcon's wings and get out while she could? Soon, so soon that Clark's heartbeat seemed to be measuring out the time, she would be sealed forever in ink and headlines and dreams and lies and fate. Fairy tale wedding. Cinderella story. They were already calling her Princess Metropolis, for God's sake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Herrenvolk

"You look beautiful," Clark said, not sure if it was okay to say, not sure if it was still okay to look, to see it, to know. _But it's the truth,_ he told himself, and for once he didn't hate that word. For once it didn't hurt. Much. He opened his arms wide, for both of them. For whoever was brave enough, or over him enough, to touch him again.

They both were. They both crowded against him, clinging, giggling under their breath with nerves and happiness, chins and noses and lips pressed to his body, Chloe's shoulders fitting just right inside the hook of his left arm, Lana's waist in his right. Both brave, over him, beautiful? Both everything good and cherished and deserving in the world? Yes, yes, all of it. Both crying.

Chloe looked up at him, wildfire smile, glassy-eyed with tears that she would probably frown and sock him in the ribs if he mentioned. Except for the smile, she looked older than he'd ever seen her before, older even than...than she had that night. (Put that night out of your mind. Not today, don't go back there today.) She was wearing cotton-candy pink, so soft it was like stained clouds, almost dove, almost whisper-grey. It should have made her look girlish, except for the way the swaths of silk were sealed tight around her body, the way the rises of her collarbones peeked above the neckline, fascinating, the way the strings of pearls around her throat and the swell of her breasts framed the wide, pale gold field of skin over her chest, making Clark's fingers ache to touch her there, where her body shifted and moved with her breathing. "I'm terrified," she said artlessly, her smile slightly self-deprecating. "Are there, like, a thousand people out there or what?"

"About four hundred," Clark admitted. "Plus the photographers. But...you look beautiful." It was okay to say it; he was sure now. True, and allowed, and it felt really, really good.

Lana stood stiffly against him, her heart rocketing against his chest. She probably couldn't help but be stiff, in that dress. It didn't seem to be made of fabric at all; it was a moving sculpture of pearls and silver wires and glitter, pinned and woven and bolted around her, complicated enough to make you dizzy as you tried to follow all the lines and folds of it with your eyes. It was too much, should have been too much, but Clark couldn't dislike it. It was armor, but armor that made him hurt with the invincible beauty of it. Lana herself was just as beautiful, but frail. Maybe she needed armor. He wanted to touch her shining hair, but it was crusted with pins and stiff silk flowers, the half-finished scaffolding that would eventually support her veil. He leaned his cheek down on Chloe's soft head instead.

Lana stroked his back once, and shifted out of his grasp. "Nobody looks better than you in a tux, Clark," she said. Whenever Lana complimented him, it sounded almost patronizing, as though she were his doting older sister. Clark sort of liked it, even though it made him prickle with frustration and confusion, too. What made things like that? Why had it always been this way, too much warmth and too much coldness at the same time, like having the flu?

"We're fucking gorgeous!" Chloe burst out, with a cackling little laugh. She'd started swearing last year, for no apparent reason, and suddenly she seemed unable to stop. It was cute. "We're fucking _superstars!_ Bring on the cameras, dahhhlings."

Clark and Lana both laughed, and the last physical connections between them broke apart, each stepping back into their own spaces. Clark shifted nervously, wanting it back again. Maybe it was sick, strange, painful, not okay. But he wanted them both with him, wrapped up in him, sheltering against him like birds in the barn rafters during a storm. Oh, God, too much truth; it didn't set you free, didn't heal your heart. It just kept everything in pieces, when all you wanted was to be with the ones you loved.

*

This is the truth.

It's Lana's wedding day. He's sick inside, not because he's losing her; he never had her, he knows that, has known that maybe from the very beginning. She's not for him.

No, he's sick and angry and weak deep down because this isn't right for her. Lana, who always yearned for freedom, high places, wings that were more substantial than tissue paper and sequins, should not be submitting herself to this. To the crowd and the cameras, who would make her their toy and their dog for the rest of her natural life. Who would claim her today and possess her forever.

They would devour her. Clark looked at her, at Lana Lang, eighteen and precious and so much bigger inside than anyone but him realized, and he wanted to smash his fist through something, because she was sewn up into another costume, ready for another front page, and this time it was her own choice, her doing, and so he couldn't fight for her. Not unless she asked him to, not unless she wanted it.

Why didn't she want it? Why didn't she _resist_ this, escape this, unfurl falcon's wings and get out while she could? Soon, so soon that Clark's heartbeat seemed to be measuring out the time, she would be sealed forever in ink and headlines and dreams and lies and fate. Fairy tale wedding. Cinderella story. They were already calling her Princess Metropolis, for God's sake. An article in Time had called her Jackie O for the twenty-first century, and Clark had gone almost blind with red anger and thrown his copy in the wood-chipper, his throat sore from the pressure of not screaming _she's Lana Lang, she's not anybody else! Let go of her!_

But Lana never screamed. Lana smiled, distantly, pleasantly, and seemed unaware that she was lying down on a stone altar, not a bed of roses. She seemed to think that life was just the same as it had always been; she still walked across the road to visit him, fresh-faced and glistening with August evening sweat, smiling up at him, pretending not to see the way he had to fight his eyes away from the drape of her camisole down her chest. She still walked with him, talking about wedding plans and college plans, with her small hand slipped companionably inside his. Left within right, her bouquet of diamonds and sapphires scraping against his heavy band of white gold, SHS '05.

She was willing. She was doing this because she chose it. Clark never asked her why, never said _do you know what you're getting yourself into?_ or _do you love him?_ He never even said, _if you change your mind, ever, before or after, now or fifty years from now, just say the word, and I'll come from wherever I am, from anywhere on earth, and I'll save you_, even though the promise burned inside him constantly, even though it was brutal punishment to know this and not to say it.

This is the truth.

It's Lana's wedding day at last.

*

"Clark, get away from the girls," his father said behind him, laughter in his voice. His hand came down on Clark's shoulder, shook him roughly but fondly.

"I'm allowed," Clark protested. "I'm not the groom."

Lana slipped her hands into his Dad's, kissed him sweetly on the cheek. "I haven't thanked you yet," she said.

Dad looked honestly shocked. "Thanked me? Lana, honestly."

She gazed up at him with that wistful, age-old look in her eyes that could melt any but the strongest man. Clark could see his father go a little woozy from it. "But it means so much to me. I'd be too scared to walk all the way down there by myself, and you -- oh, well, it sounds so stupid. But I always felt like a kind of a Kent. Like I was home, with all of you."

His Dad shot Clark a quick look. Checking for damage, Clark guessed. He smiled. It was easy. His father might never understand why it was like this, why it wasn't Clark's ring on her finger and never had even been close, but Clark did, and it was okay. He thought it hurt his folks more than it did him, now.

Chloe turned back to the mirror, fussing with her skirt, shimmying her hips inside the straight skirt and frowning poutily at her reflection. "I can't.... Is it on straight? God, I can't f-- I can barely breathe in this! Lana, you _owe_ me."

"Looks okay from back here," Clark said lazily, and then remembered that his father was standing right there and felt like a skeezy bastard. He could feel Dad's eyes on him, slightly widened, amused and not-quite-approving. Oh, what the fuck, Clark thought rebelliously. Chloe has a great ass; everybody deal with it. He made no attempt to qualify his statement.

She didn't look over her shoulder, but her eyes shifted upward from her own reflection to Clark's, a cloaked, secretive look of amusement meant for only Clark to read. After three years together, they had that couple-language, an uncrackable code of laughter and frustration and lust. Clark wondered how long it took, after the uncoupling, for that language to ossify, to become documents and histories instead of conversations and stories. Months? Years? Generations?

*

This is the truth.

Chloe is not his girlfriend anymore.

Maybe he always saw it coming, and maybe not. Clark was never the sort of person who had his eyes on the horizon, who ever thought much about the future. Chloe seemed to think about nothing else sometimes, but for Clark, the future was something that would unfold with or without him. All his life, things had happened around him, inviting him to step in and take a role, and Clark didn't figure that graduation and adulthood would change that much.

So did he think he'd always be with Chloe? No. But he didn't think they'd break up, either. He just reveled in her, in the caustic burn of her honesty, the way she didn't let him get away with anything, except the things she didn't know about. In the pit-bull fierce intensity of her devotion to him, not all-approving but all-accepting. In the way that she was simply Chloe, at his side, right now, this very minute, in the forever-present of their youth.

But she isn't Chloe anymore, not the Chloe he knows. Because the Chloe that Clark knows, the Chloe he _knew,_ loved him. He doesn't know what to do with the new Chloe, Chloe the Ex-Girlfriend, who smells and smiles and stings like his Chloe, but...isn't.

He wonders how long she planned it, but knows he'll never ask. If she wanted him to know, she would tell him. It's respect that keeps him from pushing her on any of this. Because it isn't like he has to understand it. All he has to understand is that he's been dumped, and Clark is real clear on that one.

He took her to prom, of course. Two formals a year, since the spring dance freshman year; they had it down to an art. They knew how to dress, when to show up, how to dance, when to bow out, where to go after that. It was familiar, a tradition that was only special this time because it was the last time -- the last time at Smallville High. And the last time. Although only Chloe knew that part.

Oh, Chloe Sullivan knows everything. Clark truly believes that she does. Those eyes. Oh, yes, those pretty eyes, that writer's mind, that wicked smile. She's always known things, while Clark has always been clueless and good-natured and her willing servant.

That night most of all, she had all the knowledge in the world. She _was_ all the knowledge in the world, all secrets, all mysteries, all answers. He'd been scared -- not of the act, but the circumstances. He'd tried to stop, with his cummerbund and her corsage lost to the darkness, his coat and shirt open, her skirt rucked up and his hands on the scorching hot silk of her panties, because it seemed like -- in the _barn,_ it was so graceless and unbeautiful, so wrong for a thing that could never be done again, for a girl that Clark would have moved the moon for, if she'd asked him to. He was willing to find someplace else, find another way, even if it meant waiting just a little longer, but she wouldn't listen. She pressed small hands to his face and his mouth, then grasped at his wrists, sliding her fingers up under the unfastened cuffs of his shirt, over his forearms, and she laughed at him and said, "Clark, don't be such a fucking princess."

"Now? Here? Like this?"

He could see her eyes in the moonlight, wide and wise. "Just like this," she said firmly. "I don't want some hotel; I want it here, your place, right here where I kissed you in the seventh fucking grade. I. Want it. Right now. Getting the picture yet?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said, grinning back at her, sliding eagerly into the forever-now, into night, need, gift, girl.

Chloe. Chloe had all the answers.

Even the hard, ugly answers. They came later in the night, in the strange, dreaming-hours of the early morning. Clark remembers it only sketchily. He remembers the straw and the moon, the undone fragments of their formal clothing looking sad and empty around them. He remembers lying on his back and thinking that Chloe's face looked strange and unfamiliar from this angle, while she sat beside him and talked at him, only able to look at his feet. Something about college, and growing up, and room, and opportunities, and doors, both open and closed, and right, Clark? And love forever. And breaking up.

He doesn't think he said much of anything. He remembers being blackly pleased that he'd never shared all his secrets with her. Even more blackly pleased that at least she couldn't walk away from _this,_ that no matter what, he was her first and she couldn't change her mind about that now, she would always be stuck with him, just a little bit, because of this.

She cried, a lot. He cried, a little. He made her toast and orange juice and drove her home before dawn. She slunk out of the car and into her own house, unable to look back at him.

But they were friends again, now. It was surprisingly easy. It was harder _not_ to like her, not to smile when she smiled, harder to focus on the hurt than it was to count up all the reasons that he would always have followed Chloe anywhere she led him.

Because they are friends, he doesn't make things hard for her. He doesn't say that her reasons make no goddamn sense, doesn't ask her to reconsider, doesn't try to bend her with yearning looks and kisses just the way he knows she likes them. He is a man about it, because Chloe is a lady, and his friend, in the forever-now.

This is the truth.

Chloe is not his girlfriend anymore, but that doesn't make him a free man.

*

"Come on, you've had your fun," Dad said, glowering at him, mocking his own reputation for unbending sobriety. He took Clark by the shoulders and turned him toward the door. "Get back to work, Clark."

Clark tossed a helpless look over his shoulder that made both girls (women, you should really call them women now) laugh. He grinned back at them, and for a moment it was okay. An exciting adventure, even. "See you at the altar," he said.

The church was the size of Smallville High, almost, and Clark was afraid he'd get lost crossing through the back halls, but he didn't. He went right to the door where he belonged, and opened it, and for the first time in all of this he felt pity for someone other than himself and Lana. Lex was so alone here, in this unmemorable little room full of hymnals and choir robes, standing for no particular reason in the center of the floor with a glass of Scotch in his hand. He looked at Clark, and smiled, and it was hauntingly empty.

Clark moved instinctively to his side, to help, to fix things. Because there was nothing else to do, he began to fiddle with Lex's tie, pretending to straighten it. The proper occupation of a best man, he supposed, although the idea of Lex standing even in a room by himself with a crooked tie was laughable. "Are you ready?" Clark said, although of course the answer was foregone.

"Yes," Lex said. "How much longer?"

"Twenty minutes."

Lex downed the rest of the Scotch. "She's not feeling the pressure, is she?"

"Doesn't seem to be." Not like Lex. He looked stretched taut. He looked like he was standing at the mouth of a grave. And he was still smiling slightly, which made it so very much worse. "You don't want to do this?" Clark blurted out. Not quite what he meant, not quite the thing to say, but close. He was stumbling in the dark, close to helpful, so close to saving the day that he could almost feel it.

Lex stared at him, and then shook his head with a wry smile, a real smile. "Clark Kent. Sometimes you're so.... Ah, Clark."

He frowned. Lex was his friend, his friend like the word had been new-minted just for the two of them, but sometimes he was fucking irritating, too. "Why are you _ah, Clark_-ing me? I asked you a serious question. An _important_ question."

"No," Lex said, the word clipped and businesslike. "You asked me a stupid, sentimental, manifestly un-serious question. Can you really think, even for a moment, even _you,_ that I could or would call off my own wedding with twenty minutes left on the clock, whatever I might or might not want? The world is watching, Clark. There's no time left."

Clark resisted the urge to fuck up Lex's tie, just out of pettiness. How could he be like this? He _knew_ Lex, knew that inside he was better than this, and yet sometimes it seemed like even Lex Luthor wasn't strong enough to stand up to himself. Sometimes it seemed like he was being ground down to the bone by his own legend-in-the-making, and Clark hated it when he had to watch that happen. "You would marry Lana just because people expect it of you," Clark interpreted.

Anger flashed deep behind Lex's eyes, as Clark knew it would. He didn't like to be called on it, when he weakened. Clark didn't guess that anyone really liked that. "I will marry Lana because it has to be done. That's what being a grownup is all about, Clark: living up to your obligations."

"And you still can't even tell me why?" He almost whispered it. He'd promised himself not to ask, not to need what Lex couldn't offer him. But Lex wasn't the only one who was too unused to weakness to be very good at it.

Lex sighed, and rubbed the heel of his hand in the socket of his eye. "You would do this now."

"There's no time left."

He nodded. Lex always seemed to understand, even when he didn't want to, even when Clark didn't want him to. "I'm the last of the Luthors, Clark. It doesn't matter, sure, you're perfectly free to think it shouldn't matter, or doesn't matter, but in the real world? In my world? I need to do this. I have a debt to pay."

"To the Luthors? Lex, you hate your family."

He smiled thinly. "So I claim. But, Clark, if I really hated them, would I have spent my life capitalizing on the advantages they offered to me? If I _really_ didn't want to owe anything to the Luthor family, don't you think I would have walked away years ago? I made a bargain, Clark. I took what they offered. What my father offered. And nothing is free."

"Why her?" It seemed like a stupid question as soon as Clark asked it. Why not her? Lana was _Lana._ She was kind and trustworthy and brave and giving, and what man in his right mind wouldn't want a wife exactly like her?

But Lex didn't say any of those things. He said, "I think she can survive us. She's a survivor."

"You don't have to sound so...Bluebeard about it. I don't think being the richest, most idolized woman in the nation is exactly a chamber of horrors." But that was a lie, of course. Clark suspected that it would turn out to be exactly that, and Lex quirked a little smile that told him that the lie was transparent, but appreciated.

Clark wanted to touch him. He would have done it for any other friend, for almost any other human being who looked so lost and care-worn. But he wasn't sure that he had that kind of liberty when it came to Lex. From the two women he'd loved and couldn't be with, yes. But from the one man who...the man who.... With Lex, it felt impossible.

He took hold of the shoulders of Lex's jacket and adjusted it, half a touch, carefully disguised. Lex closed his eyes, resigned and enduring. He spun the glass between his fingers, over and over. "I know you think I'll make her miserable," Lex said abruptly, and his voice was oddly high-pitched, brittle. "I promise you, Clark, I'll do everything in my power to prevent that."

"I know. Lex, I always knew that. You...care about Lana."

Lex nodded once. "I need her," he said suddenly, and the words seemed to burst out of his throat like wild animals escaping a snare. He laughed, barkish and hollow. "Any child of mine is going to need a damn good mother."

Liberties be damned. Clark sunk his fingers firmly into Lex's shoulders and gave him a stern little shake -- a Jonathan Kent shake, although he doubted Lex would recognize that. "You are going to be a great father, Lex. You _are._"

Lex nodded, but he managed to make the gesture into a negation -- _no, you're wrong, but I'll agree with you if you want me to_. Then he sighed. "Thank you for being here, Clark."

"Can you really think I wouldn't be?"

"When you think I'm ruining Lana's life? I didn't know if honor would permit you to present the appearance of support."

"I just think -- I just wish -- you both deserve real weddings, Lex. People like you and Lana, there's no reason you shouldn't be marrying for love."

"People like Lana," he said sharply, "get hurt looking for love. Believe me, Clark, I'm saving her a world of heartache in the long run."

Suddenly, he couldn't bear to be touching Lex; the cynicism, the defeat buried inside his high ambitions, the grief he cradled endlessly, fatally to himself -- sometimes Clark hated all of it, almost thought he could bring himself to hate Lex. Or at least, the way that Lex seemed to carry the touch of death with him in everything he did. Clark stepped away.

Lex turned, following Clark with his eyes. He had the hunting glint in them now, the taste for blood in the water. Maybe because Lex was so aware of his own weaknesses, he never failed to spot them in others. "Are _you_ ready for this, Clark?" he asked, solicitously, with the point of the sword punctuating his question.

He looked away. Eight minutes. No time left. "Yes," he said, and then he blew apart, shattered, felt a bomb go off in the center of him, and he said, "No! Don't do it, Lex. Don't go through with it."

Lex laughed, and the sound tapered off with a wretched breaking noise. "It's time to breed the next generation. The future of the Luthor family is in my hands; can't drop the ball now."

"I love her," Clark said, and for a moment Lex's eyes widened. He'd wondered about that. He'd wondered if it would matter to Lex, and it was a kind of comfort to see that it did.

But then Lex shook his head, the pain mellowing into stoicism in his eyes. "I did ask you, you know. You should have told me then, if this wasn't all right with you. I wouldn't have asked her if I'd known -- I wasn't lying about that -- but it's a bit late now. I am sorry." And he was. There was no mistaking that.

So it was one thing to know, that Lex cared for him, that Lex didn't want to hurt him. It was good to know. But it was, as things stood now, fruit of the poisonous tree, a lie by association, part and parcel of the Big Lie, like everything else that Clark had said and done today, this year, these past years. And the clock was running out on his chance to end it.

"I love you."

He wasn't looking at Lex when he said it. He was too distracted to respond when Lex grabbed him by the lapels, except to look down, amazed, at Lex's white knuckles, his shaking hands. "Don't. Play. With me."

"I'm not," Clark insisted. He met Lex's eyes, and he felt a thrill of fear wrap hot-and-cold around his spine. He'd never been afraid of Lex before. Clark could hardly remember the last thing he'd been afraid of. "I do."

*

This is the truth.

He's in love with Lex.

He has been half his life, it feels like, although it's only been a few years. He doesn't know quite what sealed it, at what point it became inescapable, although he suspects that it was early on. Not on the bridge, he doesn't think, but early. There might have been a little bit of time there, a few hours or so, when Lex could have receded. When he could have become just another person who didn't deserve to die, and who maybe this time didn't have to, a small, warm, proud corner of Clark's past.

But then he came back. He didn't recede. He didn't pass by. He bought Clark a fucking truck, and Clark had never believed that it was a price or a payment; he always knew that it was for Lex exactly what saving his life had been for Clark. Something easy to do, but impossible for anyone else to duplicate. A simple gift, freely given, meaning nothing and everything. A grace.

Okay, so that was the moment, probably. Always in your debt -- always in your debt -- always in your debt.

Oh, and he is. And so is Clark. They owe each other so much, so much that it will never end, and they will be locked together for as long as they both shall live. It didn't have to be that way, at first, but then it had changed, and that's what it has become. Always in your debt.

Useless to trace the course of their history together, to obsess over moments and glances and subtle promises and betrayals, just as subtle. It doesn't matter, Clark doesn't care. He loves Lex, now, in this moment, entombed together in the basement of a giant, gothic church. He loves Lex, without the pressures of the past, without the benefit of a future, in spite of the ring in Clark's pocket and the bells ringing up above and the Scotch on Lex's breath and all the truths in the world, all the soul-sucking reality of who and where they are.

Always in your debt.

Let me give you what I owe you, Clark wants to say. You say that I made you fly, that I let you see a future. Now let me finish it. Let's begin. You saw it, you know it's real, it's waiting for you. I showed it to you. Now let me take you to it.

But Lex's eye is on a new future, now. A new Luthor era, maybe, hopefully, more benevolent than the old one, but no less powerful. And Clark knows he's not invited. He can't stand in front of the cameras and be the darling of Metropolis. He can't have a fairy tale. He can't gracefully sink below the waves like Lana, sign on the dotted line and owe everything to the beautiful people, the powerful people, the lords of creation. He sure as hell can't be anybody's mother.

If you owe me, Clark wants to say, then fucking do something about it! Out of all the things I could have asked you, all the times I could have tried to cash in on you and didn't because you were my friend....

Out of all the things he could have tried to collect, he only wants the thing that Lex can't give him. Won't give him. Clark doesn't know which, will probably never know. Does it matter? They still owe each other, and they'll never be paid up now. It will go on like this forever. Always in your debt, always in your debt, always in your debt.

This is the truth.

He's in love with Lex, and Lex loves him, too. And, no, it doesn't matter.

*

"Clark," Lex said, and then fell silent. Clark resisted the urge to look at his watch again.

"It's okay," he finally said. It was all he could do, at t-minus-five-minutes, to come anywhere even close to saving the situation. "It's time."

"Clark," Lex insisted, and then lapsed again into frustrated silence. Clark sympathized, he honestly did. The burden was on Lex now to say something, and there really wasn't anything to say.

He could hear the sounds of four hundred people over their heads, plus press. Low, diffident noises, shuffling feet and idle murmurs, waiting for it to begin. The elect, the upper crust of Metropolis. He wondered if they had come because it was a social obligation, or just to gawk as the first son of the nation stood in front of the entire world and finally bound himself once and for all to Smallville. Maybe they expected Lana to come down the aisle in gingham and braids. Maybe they expected Chloe to chew gum through the service, and Clark to get cow manure on the ring when he handed it to Lex. Maybe they'd come to see the circus, and briefly, Clark hated them all.

"Your public awaits," he said dryly. Lex smiled at him, an appeal. _It's sort of funny, isn't it?_ he wanted to know. _We'll look back on this and laugh, won't we?_ And maybe they would. Seeing the future, after all, was not one of Clark's special gifts.

"You have the ring?"

"Of course I have the ring." Jeez, Clark might be in way over his head, here, but he wasn't going to lose the wedding ring.

Lex stared at him for a few seconds, searching his face. Clark endured it. Four minutes, three minutes maybe, that was all. He could hang on. He could be strong for just a few more minutes.

Apparently satisfied with whatever he saw, Lex Luthor nodded, and then turned away, facing the door, and said, "Then it's time."[  
](mailto:bettyplot@yahoo.com)


End file.
